Wisconsin native and Tokyo bronze medalist Molly Seidel withdraws from 2024 Olympic Trials
Tokyo Olympic bronze medalist and Milwaukee-area native Molly Seidel announced Thursday morning that she is withdrawing from the U.S. Olympic marathon trials due to a knee injury.
"About a month ago, my knee took this huge turn for the worse. I couldn't run on it at all," Seidel, 29, shared in a video posted to Instagram.
She explained that an MRI showed she'd broken her patella and partially torn her patellar tendon. On Wednesday, just three days before the Olympic trials race, she and her coach decided to withdraw, Seidel said in the video.
The 2024 U.S. Olympic Team Trials marathon will take place on Saturday in Orlando, Fla. The top finishers earn a spot on the U.S. Olympic team and the chance to represent the country at the Paris Olympic Games this summer.
Seidel finished second at the last Olympic trials, her first-ever marathon, and earned a spot in the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, which were later rescheduled to 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. In Tokyo, she took home the bronze medal with a time of 2:27:46. She became just the third U.S. woman to win an Olympic medal in the marathon, joining gold medalist Joan Benoit in 1984 and bronze medalist Deena Kastor in 2004.
In Thursday's video, Seidel said she's done "everything in (her) power" over the past month to get to the starting line at the 2024 trials, including working with doctors and physical therapists and lots of cross-training.
"Ultimately, I got to this week and my knee had not healed up enough, and I knew I could not race a marathon hard on it in its current state without really, really injuring myself," she said.
While Seidel did not specify which knee was injured, Runner's World reported that her right knee was heavily taped in October, when she finished 8th in the Chicago Marathon with a time of 2:23:07.
Seidel was born in Brookfield and raised in Hartland, where she attended University Lake School. She had immense success in cross country and track in high school before continuing her running career at the University of Notre Dame. She won 12 state titles while at ULS and four NCAA titles at Notre Dame.
The U.S. Olympic marathon trials are on Saturday at 10 a.m. ET in Orlando, Fla., airing live on Peacock with coverage on NBC, NBCSports.com and the NBC Sports app at noon.
More: 'She was blazing fast': Molly Seidel's high school coaches knew the future Olympian would be special
This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Molly Seidel withdraws from 2024 Olympic Trials with knee injury
